Art Chance: Ashes of our fathers, the Normandy invasion, and the soy boys

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By ART CHANCE

Let us transport ourselves back 80 years:  On Dec. 7, 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy all but destroyed the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and launched a war against America and other Western interests in the Pacific region. 

Fast forward: In December of 2019 a biological weapon was launched against the US and Western interests from China.   

We don’t need to determine whether the release of the Covid-19 virus was accidental or intentional, we only need to look at the reaction to the release. Once the release was discovered, the Chinese closed off all internal transportation and communication with the Wuhan province, yet it allowed Wuhan to maintain communication with the Western world.  Every Chinese citizen who traveled to the West from Wuhan, whether it was an act of war, or simply serendipity, was a biologically armed cruise missile aimed at the Western World.

This isn’t 1941 or 1962; there is no FDR or JFK who will pronounce it a day that will live in infamy or who will promise to pay any price and bear any burden to set it right.  

We live in the World of the Beltway wimps and the soy boys.   We still have some warriors in our military but the Left is doing its best to extirpate them, just as they are trying to eliminate police on our streets.

I’m writing this in the evening Alaska time on June 5, which is 5-ish am English time on June 6.   At this time on June 6, 1944, there were about 150,000 men crammed into landing craft approaching the French coast. Few of the troops were veterans. The command tried to somewhat leaven the force with men who’d seen combat in North Africa or Italy, but most were raw recruits who, while well-trained, had never seen combat.   

There is an argument for this from the Civil War, when commanders learned that troops who had assaulted fixed works and survived were very reluctant to do it again, see, e.g. Cold Harbor.

Although the Germans didn’t really expect the Allied invasion to come on the Normandy Coast, it was nonetheless very heavily defended. That said, most of the German frontline troops were not veteran fighters; other than a few SS tank units and Panzer Grenadiers called to the Western Front, most were rear echelon troops.  The primary Allied objective was to prevent the seasoned SS Panzer units and Panzer Grenadiers from reinforcing the troops on the front line.

The Allied troops who assaulted that line were in high school a couple of years before; their officers were at most a couple of years older. If you’ll recall that scene in “Saving Private Ryan” when the camera pans the horizon crowded with ships, it is important to know that the only things in that scene that existed on Dec. 7, 1941, were two WWI battleships and the men themselves who were in high school. Everything else had been built by American industry in scarcely three years.

We have been cowering behind our desks and staying in our homes for almost two years because of a threat that may well be nothing more than a scam, a psy-ops operation. Funny how influenza and pneumonia disappeared as causes of death during the “pandemic.”

Our fathers were better than this.

“Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods” 
― Thomas Babington Macaulay, Lays of Ancient Rome

Art Chance is a retired Director of Labor Relations for the State of Alaska, formerly of Juneau and now living in Anchorage. He is the author of the book, “Red on Blue, Establishing a Republican Governance,” available at Amazon. 

Read: Art Chance: When you wish upon a star.

41 COMMENTS

  1. Boy what a crock here, Art.
    I’m guessing that had you been around prior to WWII, you would have been in the column of folks Hemingway referred to as those who “didn’t know they were fascists yet.”

  2. Quarantine means forty (40) days for the sick one; then, by US Constitution he is entitled to another examination then he gets his liberty back. The whole well community doesn’t close. What an ignorance of the US Constitution is ripe and pungent in the Great North Land. Liberty and Justice for all or else.

  3. Thank you Art and Suzanne! My generation was blessed with the opportunity to know such men both as teachers in school and then when we entered the workforce. Given the lessons we should have learned from this generation, my question is, What Hell Happened! Your thoughts sir.

  4. @Greg Forkner – Of the ships that sustained serious damage almost all were out of combat until 43, some into ’44. Only good fortune saved the aircraft carriers and if not for that good fortune the war in the Pacific might have been a very different story.

  5. @Bill Yankee – You mean the Ernest Hemingway who was palling around with the communists during the Spanish Civil War? I number you among those who don’t know they’re communists, or at least useful idiots, yet. I do know what a fascist was, and from our other discussions I know that you don’t. You’ve bought the Soviet propaganda version that Mussolini’s Fascists and Hitler’s NSDAP were right wing, royalist or revanchist movements when in fact Mussolini was an activist communist before relenting on the private property issue and founding the Fascist Party and Hitler and the Nazis were a socialist party and their beef with the communists was simply a matter of claims to power and property spiced with some anti-semitism since the German communists were heavily Jewish.

    As to where I would have been, I don’t know. I do know that had I gone to college beginning in 1937 rather than 1967, unless I went to Berekley or one of the Ivies, the bulk of my humanities professors would not have been something between activist liberals and outright communists. It took me several semesters of Life 101 to get over my indoctrination to leftism.

  6. Art, you have no idea what a fascist is and you showed it a while ago when you accused the Anchorage assembly of being a collection of fascists.
    Hemingway was fighting alongside some communists who were against the fascists and you call it “palling around with the communists during the Spanish Civil War.” Hemingway clearly saw who the enemy was as in his own words he was anti-fascist since he learned about fascism-something you still have to learn IMO.

  7. Art, despite the prattle of certain folks above, your summation was correct and sadly there are those who are unable to comprehend it. Consider the account of a US Army Air Corp pilot who on this day 77 years ago was tasked with flying cover over a portion of the English Channel. Flying his P-47 over his station as the sun rose all he could see below in every direction was a sea full of ships headed for France. The pilot said his initial thought was, “what idiot makes war on a Nation that can produce this”? Your point dovetails nicely with that statement. Who are we as a Nation now relative to 1941? Hell, Henry and Edsel Ford today couldn’t get their EIS approved for a Willow Run B-24 factory in three years now, much less build it and produce an airplane every sixty minutes.
    Yes, the Soy Boys who commented above drinking their estrogen rich IPA’s can not fathom the productivity of their Grandfathers and Grandmothers. But then they may have received their “indoctrination”, err edukation from a publik schrool. BTW, it is clear that there are numbskulls in our midst who have not yet realized that they are commies.

  8. Art, thanks for calling out Bill Yankee as another uninformed Commie. A lot of them seem to troll around MRAK these days. Retired Commies like Bill, Whidbey, Harbor fellow, etc… have skated through life on low-end work assignments and dope. Lots of dope. The ones who repeat their worn-out 60’s rhetoric can’t bamboozle the public anymore because their brain cells have shrunk. Not much to look forward to, except denouncing other’s work.

    • Give it a break!
      You wouldn’t have a single clue about how some folks “have skated through life on low-end work assignments and dope.” You do appear to be an expert on low-end work assignments but maybe should have used more dope.
      Some fools skate through life making accusations while hiding behind a handle, too scared to use their name, too. And Art happens to be the second one that is uninformed (after you).

  9. Robert Schenker, we’ve discussed what happened during your tutorials. As you know, the Frankfurt school (antithetical to capitalism and thereby individual liberty) embraced the principals of Marxism believing they would implement them better than Lenin, etal…. an archetypical fallacy that befalls all socialists.
    .
    In any event, you know they slowly but inexorably infiltrated and appropriated the post WWII US education system. We now have three generations of victims of ideological brainwashing making up the majority of American voters. In fact, the Marxist movement is now self-propagating; today’s professors and teachers were among the first and second generations programmed.
    .
    Misguided Americans view forced appropriation and redistribution of wealth as a virtuous undertaking. However, it is a reprehensible ideology which directly contravenes Yahweh’s 10th Commandment against covetousness. In our broken world, it is a fact we all must work to exist. That said, those of us blessed with wealth are obliged to assist those truly needful. Furthermore, it is improper for us to delegate our personal obligation in this regard to our government. As you know, a driving force in this trend is politicians buying votes by giving to some Americans that which they have taken from other Americans. Our nation is indeed adrift.

  10. @Bill Yankee – You just never miss an opportunity to show your brain-washed ignorance.

  11. @Robert Schenker – Above you ask my opinion on what happened; public schools happened. The Italian communist thinker Gramsci posited that communism would never take hold in the industrialized West by revolutionary means such as had been the case in Russia. He proposed that communists work to insinuate themselves into Western institutions.

    Our traditional historical canon minimizes the radicalism in the US in the last quarter of the 19th and first quarter of the 20th Centuries. John Dos Passos’ Trilogy gives a much more accurate view. The mass migration to the US from eastern and southern Europe brought much of the region’s socialist and communist politics with it. There was a reason for the anti-immigrant, nativist slant in US politics at the time. Our history tends to focus on the more romantic populist dissent of Bryan and Georgia’s Tom Watson, but the people raising Hell instead of corn were the anarchists and communists in the large cities. They were also heavily insinuated into the nascent organized labor movement of the time. Leftist radicals managed to assassinate two US presidents and attempted to assassinate a third in this period. Wilson clamped down on both labor strife and leftist disruption for the WWI effort, but it sprang forth again immediatley after WWI and continued right up until Hitler invaded the USSR. The US left then turned on its heel and went from opposing US aid to Britain and France to screaming ‘Second Front Now.”

    When FDR gave diplomatic recognition to the USSR, the Russian Embassy and the consulates in New York and San Francisco became vipers’ nests of spies and agitators/organizers. The Soviets didn’t have to organize the media/entertainment industry or academia; they lined up to be fellow travellers and some even to become card-carrying CPUSA members. UC Berkeley by the time the US entered WWII might as well have been a NKVD field office. The US alliance with the USSR gave the Soviets vast access to the US government and defense industry. By the end of WWII, communists had insinuated themselves into positions of influence and authority in the media, entertainment, much of industry via the trade unions, the elite colleges and some state schools in more liberal areas, and government. President Reagan had more than a passing familiarity with the insinuation from his time with the Screen Actors Guild, and it should be noted that he reached back for an old OSS hand of certain loyalty to head the CIA for him. He was well aware that the US never found our Kim Philby.

    By the time I started college in ’67 in a small state school in rural Georgia most of my professors in the humanities ranged from doctrinaire New Deal Democrat liberals to outright open communists, especially those in the social so-called sciences. My response to all these moves to bring back history and civics in public schools is, “who are they going to get to teach it?” Nobody in America has had a meaningful, objective class in US History in forty years, longer in more “progressive” areas. The Ed Schools have indoctrinated the teachers and the teachers have indoctrinated our children. Anybody under about forty, older in some places, who isn’t a leftist got their values and education from home schooling, church schooling, home influence, or is an autodidact, and home-influence is fairly far down the influence list because only about half of US children live in a traditional home with two biological parents.

    So, what happened; we sent our kids to school and let them watch television.

  12. Billy Boy Yankee, what is a Fascist? How do Fascist behave? Do they get nasty in their attempts to quell dissenting voices? Do they censor speakers who have been elected by the people, merely because they may hold a differing viewpoint than their “Party Line”. Do they attack and besiege other institutions that have the ability of limiting their power? Do they seek to limit the police who are keeping the peace while giving support to lawless mobs? Do they attack their opposition by hurling invectives, always careful to not debate the facts of the issue? Do they rule via Fraud and disregard existing laws?
    The above seems like a perfect summation of the current Anchorage Assembly that Art was calling fascist, and oh, 1930’s NAZI’s.

    • You ask a lot of questions that you then think you’ve answered them yourself. For your information here is Wikipedia on it: “Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/) is a form of far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism[1][2] characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, and strong regimentation of society and of the economy,…”
      You’ve wigged out completely and have no clue about fascism, like Art IMO.

  13. I’ll take Art’s truths against Yank and Fork’s leftist drizzle any day. Couldn’t agree more, Art. Our subjugation is near complete.

    • You can have Art’s opinions but even he is not entitled to his own facts (truths). Are you another of those who doesn’t know he is a fascist yet? Heheh!

  14. @BIll Yankee – only a brain-dead leftist keyboard warrior would consider Wiki an authoritative reference. Even my lefty professors at UAS in the ’90s wouldn’t let you source from most internet sites.

    I keep a 1973 Edition of Webster’s New Collegiate by my desk since it was published before political correctness and rampant idiocy began to take over US discourse. Funny thing, back then before the idiots began to take over, they didn’t refer to the fascists as a right wing movement. Back then before our society became largely illiterate, they understood that the primary characteristics of so-called fascist governments were authoritarian control, not any particular ideology. You, Bill, are simply brain-washed.

    • And while you may consider Stalin an authoritarian liberal, there has never been a leftist authoritarian leader. They were all right wingers (Mussoline, Hitler, etc.) and go ahead and use Webster and try to show us how the Anchorage Assembly is fascist. Here is Webster today: Definition of fascism
      1often capitalized : a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
      2: a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control
      early instances of army fascism and brutality:
      Now try and pin that on Anchorage Assembly or any other leftist government.

    • I use as a source for the conservative authoritarian leaders the book by John Dean “Conservatives Without Conscience. While you may consider Dean a Commie, you haven’t a clue IMO.

  15. What’s always been interesting to me is that the Lefty-Communists who live in our great capitalist society, called the good ol’ USA, have all the chances to go live in Cuba, Vietnam, Venezuela, China, or Russia, but they never do. They prefer the soft, easy life while denouncing America. Hypocrites and Creeps. Do nothing’s. Gripers and whiners. Mostly an uneducated lot, as evidenced by a few trolls here at MRAK.

  16. Billy Boy Yankee, You obviously missed the logic in my Fascist comment. I posed the question, “how do fascist behave” Every point I made was an action taken and attributable to the Anchorage Assembly. Sorry Billy, if it waddles, quacks and has webbed feet it is a duck. Simple observation. Oh, and in the end there isn’t a dimes worth of difference between a Fascist and a Totalitarian Commie. Both seek to silence and suppress freedom. You may not be able to understand this Billy, so deeply entrenched in your thinking is your indoctrination. However, I hope the power of observation might reveal the true nature of things to you.

    • That’s because there was no logic there Bobby Boy.
      You might be able to paint Stalin as a Totalitarian Commie but he couldn’t stomach those two fascists (Mussolini and Hitler). Huge difference but Stalin was a dictator who was pretty hard on his people. Sort of the enemy of my enemy is my friend but we couldn’t tolerate Stalin, once he had served his purpose (from our point of view).

  17. No, Bill, I consider Stalin to be an authoritarian communist and Hitler and Mussolini to be authoritarian socialists. I consider Dean a feckless fool who tried to curry favor by turning on his former associates in the Nixon Administration.

    • Dean couldn’t lie under oath-something that you cover up by making up BS arguments. And neither Mussolini or Hitler were socialists (authoritarian for sure). They were both fascists without a socialist bone in their bodies.

    • And Art, notice that we palled around with Stalin too when it benefited us. The real threat was fascism, not communism.

  18. Goethe once said ” There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action”. Reading Mr. Yankee’s comments above it appears that some suffer from an affliction perhaps beyond mere ignorance. Every description of Fascist offered by Yankee utterly describes the Anchorage Assembly and their actions, which Mr. Chance rightly identified as Fascist, and yet Mr. Yankee cannot comprehend the obvious. What kind of Dogma blinds this much? I think mere ignorance is superior to the Kool-Aid these present day Leftists have swallowed.

    • Yessir that Anchorage Assembly was right-wing as well as incredibly nationalistic. You should listen to yourself-and of course they were elected and you likely consider them part of a dictatorship, too.
      You are daft!

  19. I believe (for every drop of rain a flower grows) a good man will fight for your God-given rights; the others believe “your” rights are assigned to you by the proletariat and its poltergeist, Baal. Am I right? Which is better….

  20. Mr. Yankee, Your revered Joseph Stalin, aka” The Greatest Killer of all Time” was happy to cut a deal with Hitler , a little thing called the non-aggression pact. It wasn’t until the Austrian Paper Hanger attacked Stalin and sent his Soviet troops reeling that “you gotta’ crack a few eggs to make an omelette” Uncle Joe discovered that Fascist were really really bad people.

    • Bad people, sort of on the order of the Anchorage Assembly, right? But, of course, Art thinks they are only socialists.

    • For some reason a few on here insist on attacking Anchorage Assembly because they feel they’ve lost their “freedoms” when they were required to wear a mask. They evidently equate wearing a mask with giving up a kidney and revert to calling Assembly a bunch of fascists.
      This is just insane and likely will continue, relative to getting a vaccine. Yessir, Eisenhower always had trouble dealing with the fact that half the people have IQs less than 100 but it’s easy to see we (Alaskans) have at least our share.

  21. @Bill Yankee – The difference between socialists and communists is that the socialists don’t yet have control of the police force and the military.

  22. Just another of your crocks Art. You said that Mussolini and Hitler were just socialists and they clearly had control of both police force and the military.
    Your turn.

  23. Bill Y,
    You need to move along to another forum, pal. You are wasting our time and Suzanne’s bandwidth. Your express opinions don’t burn much more than 5 watts, and really, you sound kind of burned out.

  24. Mad, your opinions are noted-too bad you don’t have one relative to the subject that Art has muddied up per his usual BS.
    If you have something to contribute, by all means go ahead-shouldn’t be an issue for you without a name.

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